Opinion Cleaning up the ADOC mess is your responsibility

Let me explain the Alabama Department of Corrections’ corruption to you in a single sentence. 

When auditors from the Alabama Department of Examiners of Public Accounts (our state-employed auditors) were conducting an audit of ADOC operations earlier this year, they encountered a system so secretive and noncompliant that the auditors were required to obtain a subpoena in order to get ADOC’s public records. 

No. You haven’t sat with that sentence long enough. Go back and read it again. Let it wash over you. Truly consider what I’m telling you. 

Because that actually happened. State auditors were tasked with reviewing ADOC’s operations, amid suddenly growing concerns among state lawmakers about those operations, and this was the cooperation they received.

Actually, it’s worse than what you think. 

ADOC required the auditors to submit every request for documents, including the most routine documents, through its legal department. And it wrote this in the audit report: “Records that should be readily available at any state agency were not at ADOC. Ultimately, ADEPA had to issue a subpoena to ADOC to obtain certain records.”

It’s good to know that someone in state government now understands what reporters have encountered when trying to get basic information out of ADOC. 

That audit report, to absolutely no one’s surprise, was yet another abysmal black eye on ADOC, Alabama legislators (except for the handful who have been screaming about this for years) and the Alabama constitutional officeholders, like Governor Kay Ivey and Attorney General Steve Marshall, who are supposed to provide reasonable oversight of ADOC. 

All of them should be forced to spend at least a month in one of these prisons that they’ve deemed suitable for human habitation. 

At the very least, they should all be required to explain publicly how they missed warning after warning, including multiple lawsuits, a Trump DOJ lawsuit and a whole Oscar-nominated documentary, about the lack of oversight and houses of horrors they were in charge of. 

For God sakes, the state auditors found that ADOC couldn’t even keep an accurate count of the inmates who died. They found numbers of 66, 68 and 72, depending on who they asked, covering a two-year period. 

Now, I know it’s hard to overshadow the fact that they didn’t know how many inmates actually died, but let us not overlook the fact that as many as 72 humans died in a single Alabama prison in less than two damn years. 

To put that into some perspective, for the same time period, Minnesota’s entire state prison system, some 11 state prisons, and its entire county and local jails—which includes dozens of small facilities—reported just 54 deaths. 

And Minnesota’s corrections department published a detailed, public report of its prison system, including those deaths with established causes. Oh, and I should also mention that Minnesota spends substantially less on its prison system. 

Honestly, I don't know what else to say about this situation. I feel like that over the past several years, I’ve spent a lot of words relaying to people the horrible acts that are occurring within Alabama’s prisons and the horrible mismanagement of that prison system and the horrible indifference of those who have gleefully accepted the jobs of overseeing this system. And what I’ve done pales in comparison to the work put into detailing these atrocities that so many other reporters, independent journalists and nonprofit agencies and community activists have done. 

We’ve all tried essentially every tactic imaginable to get people to pay attention and demand something very simple: Accountability. 

We’re wasting billions of dollars each year on this abhorrent system. We’re wasting the lives of thousands of good and decent men and women who could become productive, admirable citizens if given the chance. 

In a couple of weeks, yet another federal trial will take place regarding Alabama’s prisons system. We’re going to lose it. It will cost us dearly. We will be forced to do a lot of things that we should have been doing already. And the same old people will be telling you that there’s nothing to see here, just a bunch of bleeding hearts crying for violent criminals. 

You know that’s BS. Do you really think all of these people—the DOJ investigators, the filmmakers, the reporters, the state auditors, the inmates themselves—are lying about it? Do you really think the documents are fabricated, or that there’s a reasonable explanation floating around out there that explains how the ADOC can’t count its dead and often lies about how they died? 

You know better. 

So why don’t you demand better. 

We just had a whole election where the voters of this state—and across the country—told the folks in charge that no one is safe, regardless of party affiliation. You saw how they scrambled to please you when they thought you would vote them out. You should understand fully now the power for good that you hold. 

Use it to clean up this ADOC mess once and for all.